


Ankël Lòkëwe

by rin0rourke



Series: Athiluhakán [1]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: American History, Colonialism, Genocide, M/M, Native American Character(s), Pre-Canon, Racism, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-05-18 08:52:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5918182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rin0rourke/pseuds/rin0rourke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and his little sister may not have been raised Lenape as their father had, but the waters of the Delaware would always run in their veins. Unfortunately there are other waters, remnants of a long ago lake brimming with evil, that yearn for the final struggling breath of a Lenape.</p><p>When Jack sacrifices himself to save his sister from an unknown evil he unwittingly purifies a wellspring which holds the corpses of two powerful and ancient beings defeated by the monsters.</p><p>Now gifted with a second life Jack struggles to find his place among the American spirits in a time where the Europeans, human and mythical alike, threaten his land and his people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hìtkwike

 " ** _The silence of a peaceful night in the deep oceans of space can feel almost holy. The vast darkness is dotted with stars that go on and on—farther than any light or thought can seem to travel. But they do."_**

 *

Some days his human skin itched, as if the fur was matted down beneath it. He rubbed his forearms, his skin tight from the closeness of the fire, but it did not alleviate the irritation. He didn't hate to go about as a human, but for all its benefits he could not shake loose the prickly feel of fur combed wrongways. 

He watched with greedy eyes as smoke curled from the firepit up to the opened slat overhead where the winds battered it away. He could hear them blowing down from the glacier topped Appalachians, dancing across the wide frozen water of the Great Lake as only the winds safely could, redolent with the snow scent of the thin mountain air. Sometimes that perfumed breath of the mountains brought evidence of humans, of woodsmoke and pipe herbs, the snow damped timber of many warm wigwams in a single area. Other times it brought the enticing smell of prey, tempting him out for a hunt.

Tonight he wanted nothing to do with either species of animal, he wanted only to run. No, the wolf wanted the run, he wanted only to be wolf. Energy shivered along his tense shoulders and back, raising the short fine hairs and sending a thousand little stings where fur should be, could be, if he relent. 

He had been told, no, **commanded** to stay inside, as if he were some child that needed to be protected from the dangers and temptations of the world. His brother may be able to pluck knowledge from the air like berries from a bush, but even **he**  could not foresee the future, locking him away inside over an ominous feeling. He bared his teeth at the flames as a log crumbled away into coals, then turned his eyes back to the sliver of sky.

It was such a perfect night.

Outside the world would be drenched in moonlight, the snowglitter dazzling enough to rival the stars, the winds would have so flung the snow about that the hardpacked stormfall would be coated in the lighter, powdery dunes perfect for pouncing, digging, and stalking moonbeams as they darted and swooped about to admire the shimmering crystal world of winter. 

And here **he** sat naked beneath a pelt of fur, unwilling to endure clothes, and longing for that dance of windtossed snowdrift, for the cold that viced like the clutching hands of an ogre and turned every breath to near agony. 

Finaly he could abide it no longer. He had stayed, cooped up in this tiny dwelling, all of the day and much of the night. Whatever great tragedy he was to avoid was surley passed by now. He had promised to stay inside, while his oh so clever brother was out visiting the villages along the Lake, but his fur itched and the moon was high and the winter snow called to him. 

He threw back the flap covering the door and stepped naked out into the frigid air.

For one terrible moment the cold grasped him, seizing his lungs and stealing his breath, but in the next instant he was wolf, and the choked air fumed out of his muzzle in a pale fog. His coat was sleek and thick, three sturdy layers of fur the soft deep gray of shadows on snow. 

The moonbeams were out, as whimsical as they were vigilant, and they drew near to him in greeting. His fur glowed silver when the beams caught his long guardhairs, his breath a phosphorescent plume, among them he himself seemed a creature without substance, a being composed of mist and light and little else.

Then the wind barreled through the gathering moonbeams, scattering them like fireflies, and spun around him excitedly, shrieked joyously at him, combing cold fingers through that thick warm fur and soothing any lingering human discomfort. A second wind buffeted the first to the side and tossed snow in his face, he snapped playfully at it then shook his body hard and full until all felt right. Human he would have been cold, shivering, longing for the fire; wolf he was warm, and longed only for the run.

The winter winds were a playful bunch, for all their roughness, and delighted at his joining them. It had been too long, he knew, since anyone but the fallen leaves danced in their wake. They beckoned him further out and he happily trotted after them. His brother would not worry over his absence, with his higher knowledge he would know exactly where he was.

The moonbeams held back, wary of the Lake. The sky was alight with spectacular stars, but the ice was an unrelieved black, as if any light the moon and heavens spilled down was sopped up, swallowed down and smothered. 

Millenia ago a battle was waged in that sky, and to Earth there crashed a monstrous vessel; it shattered the bedrock and breeched the watershed unleashing into the flood beings of evil and fear. It created a lake so massive one could paddle for days in a canoe and still not see the other side, and beneath the water the creatures lurked. They possesed the animals and plants caught in the flood, twisted and turned them into unrecognizable horrors. 

They became the Wiwilmekw, slithering through their nightmarish world, hungering for the fears of others. 

He spared a disdainful thought at the moonbeams' caution. It was deep winter, and the Lake was a long black plain of ice thicker than his body was long, the Wiwilmekw were safely imprisoned beneath. He had played on the frozen stretch every winter since he was a child, and no fear-being had ever broken through.

So he ran.

Above him the moon was a bright white ball paddling through the river of light that wound it's way across the sky, he angled towards it, chasing it through the night.

His muscled bunched and stretched like the ebb of the tide pulled by the sea, his paws beat like waves against the ice, mantled in snowdrift, as they propelled him forwards. The layer of snow cushioned his run, protected his pawpads from the sharp brittle frost that grew on the ice like brambles, the winds rollicking in his company spun the drift around him in high whirls that cought the light and illuminated his way.

He didn't know for how long he ran, skimming like a skipped stone over the ice. The stars wheeled, the moon dipped from its apex to the shores of the river of light and then onto the glittering bank. Ahead he saw the severe black of the ice rise up into mounds against the sky, volcanic islands he recognized as the places the Wiwilmekw liked to sun themselves. He remembered, years ago, an enterprising young woman had paddled her canoe to the main island where a Wiwilmekw with copper scales made it's home, and cut off it's tail to take back with her.

The story amused him, the pure audacity of it, and he settled into an easy lope, sides heaving, as he neared the shore. No Wiwilmekw could survive this harsh cold, there would be none on the island though the mountain springs were resistant to the freeze, warmed as they were by the volcano. He would rest here, then head home.

There was a great **_THUMP_** , a hard hollow sound that pulsed beneath his paws like a heartbeat. He paused and looked around him at the eternity of black ice. The winds halted beside him, questioning his distraction, their swirling silver snow began to settle back to the ice, losing their glow as they touched down, as if the Lake sucked the life and light out of each glimmering flake.

Something had hit the ice, he rationalized. Sometimes peices of glaciers broke off as they shifted, fell from their cliffs and into the Lake, creating waves that drowned whole villages along the shores. At least the ice would smother any wave from this one.

A second **_THUMP_** , more powerful than the first, followed by more, and more, until a drumming that matched his own racing heart vibrated under the ice.

_Under the ice!_

He flew like an arrow from a bow towards the shore, the winds a cacophony of alarm urging him on. 

He heard the high sharp cracks, felt the shifting under his paws with every leaping step, but he didnt look down. The Lake was black and cold and bottomless, he could see nothing within that darkness, but he **knew** , and knowing he **feared**.

With a great crash the ice opened up, and like a dark terrible mouth the rend swallowed him in the waters like the starlight and moontouched snow.

*

The remnants of the Great Lake, the original sources drawn on by the horned serpents in the times of flood, the few places surviving evil still dwelled, struggled to continue existing in an increasingly changing landscape. The serpents had secreated themselves into these shrinking pools, fled the burning vengeance that had boiled their dark water kingdom to steam and scorched their lakebed to harden clay. They, the cowards who fed on fear, hid themselves from the molten wrath of the brother gods, their once vast realm of nightmares now a network of aquifers, reliant upon the springs and wells that fed into rivers and lakes to hunt. 

They lay beneath the water table, under bedrock and shale, and hungered for the days of old, when the land lay submerged and the people knew fear. They longed, too, for the age of stars, and the whole of the worlds they had plundered.

Their ever shrinking realm of nightmares enraged them, and that rage tainted their waters, seeping out to poison all that drank from it with their evil. Within the forests of the Appalachian Plateau one small wellspring into that dark kingdom boiled black with hate, and twisted generations of trees that encircled it's rocky banks.

Centuries passed into millenia, and soon those that grew in the water new little else but the sorrowful world they inherited. They had lived all their lives near that dark pool, and had not once thought to be afraid. The Black Willows had never felt the nibble of a hare or the caress of a bee, the Pitch Pines did not miss the playful squirrels as they never came near enough to gather the fallen pine nuts, the Black Walnut had been perfectly content to dangle its thick coiling roots into the cool spring.

They did not covet what they had never known, held no envy, felt no sorrow, their seeds had germinated in the dark, sprouted in the quiet, lived in seclusion. They had no name for the loneliness if they had felt it, had never spoken even amongst themselves, for the old ones before them had been quiet, as had the ones before that. On and on through the centuries and millenia, the trees of this lake had learned that to be silent was to survive.

Until a most peculiar boy had wandered into their circle. 

The trees here had never seen a human, even the Black Walnut, the oldest of them, had never witnessed such a creature. They bent towards the child, curious and uncertain. For the first time in centuries the trees of this evil place faced something other than silence and pain.

The Black Walnut had never sheltered anything at its base, no nest had been built in its branches; it was not in a Black Walnut's nature to be kind, it was a selfish solitary tree, it seeped poisons into the soil so that even the roots of others left its area be; it was then greatly alarmed and uncomfortable when this strange gangling animal scurried towards it. It trembled as the child dug desperately through the snow at its base for nuts, piles of them left to rot beneath layers of frozen leaves, no animals carrying them off, no seedlings taking root. 

The feel of snow and soil shifting, the taste of air breathed directly from lungs, the warmth as this small sapling of a human curled against it's bulging roots was all so strange. For the first time in the 120 years it had been alive, the walnut tree felt the warm touch of another being against it's bark. 

That first night, as the child slept fretful in his hastily dug burrow, the tree shifted, within and without, it bent it's pliant roots towards that warmth, cradled it, studied it with the closest to awe a tree could manage.  

And when the morning came they faced another new experience, as dawn brought the voices of more humans, and the child scrambled out of his shelter back into the woods, into the arms of a weeping woman, they knew **loss**. They knew what it meant, in the weeks that followed, to be lonely. 

And they knew such joy as they had never hoped or known **how** to hope, when that child returned. 

For those few short years the trees knew laughter, and they knew love.

*

Moskim was a creature of Spring, the personification of **life** , life manifested and embodied in all of nature, and he was walking in winter silence. The forest, a vibrant thriving world of green velvet shadows now lay bare and dormant around him, cloaked in shiny moonlit snow.

Winter did have sounds, the crunch of the snow underfoot, the sharp clear crack of icicles, the gurgling hunger of the life not at rest, but it was not **his** season. It wasn't just the absent birdsong or the lack of animals rustling among the underbrush, his world was more than a constant migration of fauna. It was the growth, cell by cell, of tiny tendrils of white roots out of a seed tunneling and tangling in the ground, it was drinking in the rain, readying the new shoots that would be forcing their way up to the surface, it was the bottleneck of pent up energy ready to burst forth in celebration, in the chaotic joyful dancing frenzy of spring. 

He could feel the leaves unfurling in every raised hair on his skin, the claustrophobia of overcrowding, the discomfort in his feet of root rot. He felt the pulse of invisable growth, the cellular movement of photosynthesis, as much as he felt his own heartbeat.

The loss of it was as horrifying as it was foreign.

But the call of the forest had beckoned him, he had felt the tremor of magic world's away in his winter haven. It had been… disquieting. Loss did not exist to trees, all things were used, were in transition, part of that recurring cycle of seasons, of nature. To search for something other than water or nutrient rich soil was wasteful of energy best used to grow and spread seed. Trees talked amongst eachother, but they did not care for eachother, their warning systems were self serving.

They did not **_mourn_**.

He wandered deeper down the ancient trail, tugging his feathered cape close; so great and unnatural was the trees grief that he would brave this soul numbing cold.    

Just ahead was a huge hemlock, a rising triangle of darkness speering up, almost to the heart of the rising moon. He touched a hand to the evergreen, as much to reasure himself of life as to begin his investigation. The trees of this forest were dormant, but even in sleep they whispered, a soft steady hum of cold sluggish sap, the sleeping breath of life.

He needed that, just for a moment, to ground him.

In his minds eye he summoned the forest in the hight of summer, full and thick with a lush canopy of leaves. He took that image and pushed it into the tree, tempting it with dreams of sun and rain and loose unfrozen soil.

Of a boy with a playful smile.

He felt the shift, as easy and aching as stretching after too long sitting still, his fingers on the bark and branches of his fellows, the chill of icicles in his hair, his feet in the earth where frost browned husks and the soft thick mulch of old leaves and pine needles lay beneath the snow.

The hemlock, drowsy from winter, murmured sleepily at his prodding, unhappy to be woken in the cold. It could not remember seeing the boy and didn't particularly care to try.

He was unfazed by the dismissal, in fact it cheered him. Here was a tree behaving as it should. The mournful calling had come so strongly with this one vision though, so the boy had to be involved somehow.

Moving on he reached down to the roots, where tree met tree, and pushed that summer warmth into the next, and the next, and would the next after that until he reached all that lived withing reach of another. 

It was an exhausting and disagreeable process.

Old as many trees were they tended be aloof and unimpressed by the goings on around them at the best of times, times when they were not rudely pulled out of a sound winter's sleep; saplings would be more helpful, less jaded, but even a nudge out of dormancy in this harsh winter was too risky. These old ones were even less pleased to be asked of something as minor as a human. Shawnee, Iroquois, Lanape, the trees knew the passage of many a people, some stayed longer than others, but ultimately humans were a migratory species. 

They, like the visiting birds, like the short lived wildflowers and grasses of the underbush, were not made to last the winters.

The scent of autumn leaves filled him, a glory of reds and golds, his message of warmth turned brisk, the smiling child laughed as he scrambled up branches. He turned his head, looked into the dense forest towards the distant unseen tree that had answered his summer with fall.

He could not see it, but he knew it as he knew everything, the knowledge plucked from the air like a scent, he needed but a whiff. The place it resided was one he also knew, very well, but it had changed. Where once there had been silence, even in the fever of spring, now there resonated a high clear chime. 

It alarmed him that he had not noticed it before. His power lept forward, into the pine he held and through the system of roots, reaching out to grab at the source of that vibrating magic and pull. The trees between them shuddered and bent like reeds buffeted by the wild winds, then righted themselves as if they had never moved.

He came out of the trees into a jarring scene.

Confined evil had spread its poison here undisturbed; he was not suprised trees had managed to grow, however short their lifespans were in such a place, trees were hardy things, pitch pines particularly, but the **way** they had grown was **_horrific_**. Scarred and fractured with twisted branches and multiple trunks, roots looping up from the ground in a desperate attempt to get as far from the water's edge as possible. Their grief, it was near oppressive, resonating out like thousands of vibrating icicles. They would never drink from this spring again, they cried out in the way of trees, even if there passed a thousand days with no rain. 

Opposite him cliffs of jutting granite bedrock formed a jagged uneven amphitheater, topped with two broad and towering Hemlock trees he had planted himself, each standing sentry on its own ledge, and covered in dead and dormant underbrush. 

The moon still making his way across the sky shone down from the highest ledge in a dazle of rays onto the bright glittering ice. Below, humming in a slow ponderous tone, was a pressurized bubble of pure wild magic.

He reached out to taste the energy around him, higher knowledge told him that beneath the thick ice the water was clear, but of uncertain depth, the granite sloping down in the same jagged step like manner into the black and cold. 

But stone held no life, he couldn't see anything within that rock bottomed darkness. 

" _Tùkwimënshi_ ," He ran his hand down the mournful tree that had answered his call, trying not to let the urgent fear this, this unknown filled him with trickle through the link. " _Kèku hèch le lòkëwe? Kuwaha hèch na skìnu?"_

The Black Walnut was old, its gray bark lined with fissures of past growth, it's lower branches drooping to the snow. It had never known a bird that nested in it's boughs, never felt a squirrel that bounded through it's leaves, but it had loved a boy that had explored this long forgotten lake unmolested and unafraid. A boy with warm calloused hands that gripped onto bark, bright laughter that danced through the forest like dappled sunshine, children playfuly dogging his heels, trampling brush and grass and clove beneath booted feet, grabbing onto the branches low enough for them to hang from.

The Black Walnut's drooping branches had been a favourite.

But yesterday was an awful day. The Black Walnut was not an evergreen, it's sleep was much deeper than the others of the lake, but it had heard a great cry from the hemlocks. Few of the other trees had stirred from their own slumber to witness the tragedy, but the Black Walnut had. 

" _Mahchikwi kèku hèch le_?" He prompted the mournful tree.

The voice that answered was as deep and black and cold as the bottom of the frozen lake, he turned to face the approaching wolf, monstrous in size, claws clacking on the opaque ice. With every pawstep the very life of the forest around them seemed to tremble, as a flame trembles in even the most gentle of winds. The wolf lowered his muzzle to the ice and sniffed, his breath fuming out in a cloud as the words he spoke chilled Moskim's soul. _" **Ankël lòkëwe**." _

 _He died yesterday_.

*

Hìtkwike (Among the Trees)

Tùkwimënsh (Black Walnut Tree)

Kuwaha hèch na skìnu (Do you know that young man?)

Kèku hèch le lòkëwe? (What happened yesterday?)

Mahchikwi kèku hèch le? (Something bad happened?)

Ankël lòkëwe (He died yesterday)


	2. Pukòskihële

**_"The thinking of it is a cold horror. I’m remembering the last time. I felt that same cold. When I wents into the diamond dagger. The one that speared through the Pitch, through the Pitch’s cold heart and into the stone and held the Pitch prisoner. Kept him so he wasn’t alive or dead, just … There. All the while, inside the dagger was my boy Nightlight. Surrounded by the coldness awful. For almost longer than ever. It froze my boy. It made him still. And made his memories separate from him. But my light warmed him and wakened him and made my Nightlight boy free. He broke out of the diamond ’cause of me. He needed a bit of the Moon’s light to make him strong again.“_ **

*

Moskim sat, forlorn, on the edge of the uppermost granite slab, a long, crooked length of wood across his thighs; below his brother stalked the ice, a massive shadow in the silver moonlight. He had been unable to pull any knowledge from the gelid water, the power below was a disquieting, yielding pressure against his skill, like pushing a hand against the soft underbelly of an animal, and he refused to force it. 

There was a child among that frozen magic, not yet herded on to the next life.

Higher Knowledge brought him other children, children wandering lost in frozen wastes, bellies empty, faces frost crusted and blistered by the abrasive snow hurled at them by wild angry winds that battered ice crystals into the crevices of clothes against skeletal bodies. Children lost, children abandoned, children willfully starved. They came like an avalanche, a moving cloud of sorrow and death, burying him beneath the senseless cruelties and tragedies that plagued winter, as the snow buries everything not swift enough to flee. Children with clouded eyes and protruding ribs like reeds, children that lay, too tired even to fuss, in the snow, ignorant that they had not enough meat on their bodies to see them through the night.

Children slipping terrified through ice into water that felt like thousands of insects piercing their stingers through soft flesh.

Gently he pushed the Knowing aside, silencing the din of misery. He knew of death, life was death, and took a thousand trails through the heart wrenching agony of the world to reach it. He was a being of spring and healing, even without the Higher Knowledge piling them at his feet he knew death, every medicine plant’s roots dug deep in the ended lives that made the soil rich. Winter was neither unique nor alone in its acceptance of loss.

He was not here to save or comfort an ordinary child, as much as his heart quaked for the boy; such a duty belonged to his brother, who understood as only the dead can. He was here because the magic in the lake was too wild, too dangerously concentrated to be left unprotected. The child, he would do what he could for the child, but his priority was dispersing the energy away from this cursed place. The misfortunes that plagued the inhabitants of winter were not his to correct.

The Knowing brought him the children sacrificed, beautiful little corpses raised in bloodied hands to the weeping gods. So carefully, so devotedly disposed they could almost pass as the living, if not for the crystals of ice glittering upon their skin like stars. He flinched away.

They had never asked.. **He** had never asked for such a thing. 

He turned his gaze to the moon, whose name counted among the gods the qhapaq hucha was performed for, and wondered how that mysterious man who called it home felt about that. Moskim had never promised the world more than he could. Medicine and a guiding hand. Was the moon watching now; as his light turned the frozen aquifer into a scintillant paten of which any spirit, good or ill, could sup? Did he know a boy lay below the frozen surface, sacrament and sacrifice, waiting for any one of the invading spirits from across the water to take in mock eucharist to themselves, heedless of the child ghost they destroy in the process?

Some protector. Some guardian of children.

He sneered at the sky, angry at himself, at the occupiers, and at the impassive moon who had vowed to protect and yet could do nothing but watch. Temper turned to impotent rage, and he knew at once his brother-selves stood with him. Nanabozho’s wrath was a fire in his chest that scalded his heart; he wished one of them really had thrown mud in the moon’s face.

But that tale was never of them.

He ran a hand along the curve of the willow branch in his lap, reaching for distraction as he reached for calm. TwineTender it was called, a quiet spirit, a sad spirit. For it had been companion and protector to the child lost beneath the ice, a staff carved from the willow trees on the bank of a river where a young weaver turned warrior had fallen, one among many of the battle dead.

The Knowing faded as Gloskap settled more substantially inside him, and Ioskeha as well. He drew instinctively on the compassion and wisdom his two other selves offered and felt, not peace, but some form of balance, as a Moose places all his weight on his four hooves, until they were the four of them a unit. The Great Hare come together again. Light and Life and Protector.

The Wolf turned his gaze to them, and Hare knew that though he felt the others like brothers at his side, only one watched back. He often wondered, as was his nature to wonder at all things, what he was. Four spirits whose strength increased by their union? Or one powerful god quartered and portioned out into lesser vessels?

His brother Wolf had found his union in death, Chibiabos, Moqwaio, Fenrir, Mateguas, he stood now wholly and fully himself, a great god of Death. His other sibling, the third of the triplets that made up Hare and Flint and Wolf, found his true self as an individual, by nature or choice he had spurned a union.

Perhaps, Hare considered, perhaps it was their separation that triggered these differences. Both Wolf and Flint had lost a self in childbirth, dying with their mothers, while Hare had always been eldest of the three, together in mind and spirit all of their lives.

What did it feel like, to have that void, that emptiness of your lost self inside of you? Or did everything they were, everything they could have been transfer to those which remained? Was that why, in his madness, one Flint had sought the demise of another?

 _ **"Elusive answers always haunt those who are all-knowing,”**_ Wolf informed Hare as he ascended the jutting bedrock. **“ _Gods of knowledge drive themselves to ruin over impossible riddles.”_**

“What good is a trickster that cannot himself be a fool?” 

 _ **“What good is a medicine man so lost in his thoughts he can’t see the sickness to heal it?”**_ Wolf settled himself into the snow, easily dwarfing his elder brother beside him. 

“What is there to heal? The child is drowned, the Serpents vanquished, the waters purified.” Hare ran his thumb over a knot on the willow branch, suppressed the pull of the Knowing from the spirit within, the phantom laughter of a lost little boy. “All that remains is for you to claim the dead, so that I may disperse this wild magic.”

_If Flint bothers to show himself._

Wolf’s ears turned back, as if he could sense the sneering thought, and Moskim felt shamed. _**“Our brother will aid us.”**_

Moskim wanted to believe that, of the Hares he alone lacked the harsher brother, the evil twin. For all that they were one, that all the brothers were their brothers and each of them loved and hated and mourned as a family, Moskim did not have the bond, good or otherwise, they had with Flint. 

Moskim could never regret his little brother Wolf’s life, but to have them both, to love them both.. If his Flint had been as impatient as the others, had not let Wolf be born first and followed their mother into death’s arms, would he have been as vile and vicious as Ioskeha’s brother? Or would he have been like Malsum? A harsh, but caring opponent?

He could feel the discourse in himself, the bitterness and hatred of Nanabozho, the neutral lack of faith from Ioskeha, and the disquieting grief and pity from Gloskap. 

Moskim alone was left to hope. 

“Yes.” He said firmly, struggling between drawing his brother selves closer to his hope or pushing their negativity away. “Our brother WILL help.”

In answer Wolf leaned against him, his warm heavy weight a great comfort.

Elusive answers always haunt those who are all knowing, and Higher Knowledge had never been as quiet as in that moment, when Moskim waited in the winter cold above a tragedy for aid from an evil god.

The crow arrived first.

He was larger than any other of his kind, gliding through the trees as silently, gracefully as an owl. As he swooped up to land at their feet the smell of wood smoke followed, and when he greeted them with a bow the moonlight glinted rainbow colors across his black feathers. 

He did not speak, simply turned his yellow gaze back into the trees. Moskim and Wolf stood and shared a look, anticipation, pleasure, joy, Wolf grinned, his sharp teeth an animalistic threat in the human gesture, and Moskim realized he was smiling just as wide.

Of course their brother had come, they were family after all.

Moskim reached for the others, eager to share his satisfaction, but found little change. Nanabozho remained rageful, Ioskeha neutral, though no longer doubting, and most confusing of all was Gloskap, whose grief and pity only deepened as their little brother stepped out of the dark and onto the bank of the glittering lake.

The crow called softly, a sickly croaking sound that flit redgold sparks of burning ash about his beak, and glided from the ledge to Flint’s shoulder, perching as delicately as if he were a small falcon, and not larger than Flint’s entire head. 

“Nimàt,” Moskim followed the crow down to greet his brother. “Nulelìntàm èli paàn.” Flint lounged casually against a twisted pitch pine and watched him with dark wary eyes. Once he had been ruler of the permafrost, the forever frozen earth no ray of sun could touch or warm, now he was just a spirit of rock and cold, long ago given up his great power for freedom. “Thank you, for coming so quickly, you must be busy with winter.”

“The visiting manëtu are trying to start an early spring to continue their wars.” Flint rolled his shoulders, adjusting to the heavy weight of the bird. The ice coating his dark leather cape bore fissures similar to that of the pine tree he leaned against, the rhombi like glittering reptilian scales. “I considered letting them kill each other, but that would only encourage them.”

Moskim felt Nanabozho’s anger flush through him and barely suppressed the scowl, but Flint’s black eyes caught the expression, his thin lips curled into a cruel smile.

“I knew they would be with you. Hè Manapush, how is all that fresh ocean air treating you? I have a message from the Wabanaki, do you mind passing it on to your friends among the Iroquois?” He pumped his fist up into the air until his bicep smacked into his other hand at the inner elbow in a gesture well recognized by those who battled with the French.

“Could you be more vulgar?” Moskim demanded, disbelieving that the conversation could turn to this so quickly.

“I hope so,” Flint said with good humored malice, “I would hate to think I’ve peaked.”

Moskim shoved his brother-selves back before either Nanabozho or Ioskeha could retaliate, “Must you antagonize them?”

Flint simply smirked at him, arms crossed, while the crow regarded him with a single smoldering eye. “They wish for my death.” 

“They wish for you to stop your mischief.”

“My nonexistence then, because I am what I was made to be,” Flint’s face and voice hardened to stone and he straightened from his recline against the tree. “I am the left hand to your right, your opposite in all things; I have the right to be as I am.”

“ _ **So you do.**_ ” Wolf approached, “ _ **Greetings my brother.”**_

“Hè naka naxansa. You summoned me oh great death god?” Flint relaxed his stance, uncrossing his arms to greet him, his frost covered hand cording through the thick fur. 

Moskim tried to shove back the hurt at how easily Flint showed affection to Wolf, but it would not be suppressed as easily as the anger. It had nowhere to go, none of his brother selves would take it. “There is a child soul, below the ice.” he explained, indicating the glowing lake.

“That IS unfortunate,” Flint’s voice was casually mocking, “but as I said the invaders are causing the thaws, not I.”

“You are not on trial here, brother, we know who killed the boy.”

“Of course you do,” Flint said acidly, “how could I forget? You know everything.”

 _ **“Flint.”** _ Wolf nipped him hard on the bicep with his teeth, causing the god to jerk away with a hiss. On his shoulder the crow voiced his displeasure, sending bitter black smoke into Flint’s face. “ _ **Now is not the time to air your grievances. Come, to the water’s edge.”**_

Wolf led them both to the ice, where the high chime of magic still rang. 

“You wouldn’t know this place Flint, as you were absent when our brother was killed, bu-”

Flint gave a snort of fury. “Being exiled to a giant turtle tends to prevent a person from helping.”

Moskim squashed down his temper, “This was one of the last dwellings of the Horned Serpents. The underground caverns were too deep to hunt them in, so we sealed them away instead.”

“So THATS why the trees are all so ugly.”

“ _ **Flint**_.” Wolf snapped his teeth on the name.

“You are not telling me anything I do not know.” Flint snapped back. “I’m neither idiot nor child, and though I was ABSENT, I know the stories. Wintertime is nothing BUT stories. I know this lake, and I feel the vast power within,” he rounded on Moskim. “You say a boy drowned, well I don’t need your Higher Knowledge to conclude just as well as you two that something purified the beasts, and if a corpse lies at the bottom of this lake it is there because it _chose_  to be.”

“Well,” Moskim huffed. “I guess explanations are not needed then.”

“What is not needed is your treating me like one of your lost little humans, desperate for guidance. If you want me to unfreeze the lake, just say so.”

“That’s not-” Moskim felt his anger flutter, then dissipate into guilt. He breathed deep, and sighed. “That won’t work.”

Flint studied him, waiting for more, but Moskim turned away, ashamed that he had fought with the one he needed to ask the impossible of. Was he not the one to hope? He stared at TwineTender, tracing the grooves in its wood, and called on his brother-selves for strength. He was not merely himself here, he was the Great Hare, and there were events of higher importance than his own pride, or injured feelings.

“Naxansa?” Flint probed Wolf when it was clear Moskim would not continue.

“ _ **You know that my body was never recovered.”**_

“Yes.”

 _ **“It is here,”** _ Wolf pawed the surface, “ _ **at the bottom of this wellspring.”**_

Flint approached the lake, his dark eyes searching, as if trying to see beyond the moonlit ice. 

“Two corpses...”

“ _ **Three**_.” Flint looked sharply at the death god, who watched him, still as stone. “ _ **Down in the dark waters with the shredded remains of my own body is the corpse of another, a being of pure light, from the time before the moon came to rest in our skies.”**_

Hare remembered that time, the time of the great flood, when a terrible twisted object fell from the sky, shattering the bedrock that had hidden the pressurized waters of the aquifer. And as he remembered the Knowing came, of a boy’s essence and soul being sucked away, locked in a weapon plunged into a cold dark heart, and falling, falling away from the object that would smash into the earth, washed away in the floodwaters to the crevice that now fed this tiny spring.

The boy who was made of light by light was freed, and free soon wrapped about him a new form, as fulgid and flighty as his the one he left, discarded, forgotten, in the bottom of a lake. 

Until a new soul touched it, and was absorbed as a root drinks the rain.

“Three corpses and you do not know which the child soul clings to?” 

“It fused with the light being.” Hare explained as the thread of Knowledge frayed.

“A body of light cannot hold a mortal’s soul.” 

“ _ **Indeed, and so it fled,**_ ” Wolf indicated to the ice, “ _ **into the boy’s own corpse**_.”

The horror of such a thing still speared Moskim’s heart. The light remained tied to its original soul; it was trapped, as the child was trapped, in a place of terrible frozen darkness. The unnaturalness of their joining would eventually tear them apart.

Would it reach beyond that? Would the destruction seize too the life that spectral boy was building for himself?

“Is there nothing you can do?” Flint asked.

Moskim replied, unsteady, as he always was when he had no clear answer. “We can give him life again, we can lift him from the lake and chase the water from his lungs, but his memories are too entwined with this other’s. Humans are not made for separate selves. They will go mad.”

“Then banish the memories.” 

“The cold is sunk too deep. It is a cold not of this world, a cold of an evil heart.”

“He won’t survive?”

“No human would...”

The silence that followed was gravid with the implication.

“You want me... to..?” Flint stared at his hands, large and dark and covered in rime. 

“I understand it is a large sacrifice,” Moskim began, his fingers digging into the wooden staff like claws as he forced himself to make the request, “we have already asked so much of you in the past, and there is no guarantee it will succeed, but we cannot leave this lake here, vulnerable as it is to any of the manëtu foreigners. The power here is too great. If they stole it...” He turned to face his brother, drawing strength from his other selves. “We need you t-”

Flint was kneeling, bloody hands pressed to the ice.

While Hare had been struggling to give voice to his request, Flint had summoned a blade of ice and sliced his palms, forcing the blood, and his power, into the frozen lake to the dark waters below.

“Brother...” Moskim could do nothing but stand there and feel shamed as the low ringing of wild magic changed, tiny shifts to accommodate the subtle trickle of Flint’s own. Hare was life and light, Wolf was peace and death, neither of which could penetrate the raw might of the lake, or tempt the terrified soul from its prison; but Flint was cold and dark, he could weave his blood through the lake like red embroider thread, until it recognized him as its own. Water among water.

The thread swam through the darkness, probing for that tiny spark of life, that quiet cry of existence in the realm of fear and death, a red glowing ember in a fire pit in winter. When he found it, he speared it like a fish.

The soul jerked, thrashed at the invasion, so fractured, so frayed; it was already tearing itself apart, the duality of nature that was human unable to fuse fully to the purity of spirit the creature of light demanded. The innate selfishness of childhood could not hold up to such standards, and was slowly being shorn away. Added to it, shadowing it was the fear; true chilling fear which urged the two natures to rip at each other in defense of themselves.

Flint took his own power and poured it into the boy, carefully stitching back every ragged edge with his own control of snow and ice, the cold hard winters, the ferocity of protecting one’s own patched anger to compassion, the arrogance of pitting oneself against the elements fused courage to pride, the will to hunt and kill another to survive one more day stitched love to greed.

Unbidden by him the power in the water followed his thread. Every stich of his blood in the boy’s soul was saturated in it. Shaping, changing. It was not unlike when he gave the rose its thorns or the bees their sting, or when he carved the boulders of glacier topped mountains into monster men of stone. Just as the child’s own nature calmed and accepted winter, so did the water, until everything hummed the same chime, water, magic, child, and star being.

All were now of winter, and the shadow of fear blurred away.

He surveyed his work, seeing much clearer now that the water had given itself to his season. 

The child had once been warm brown hair and golden skin, now a terror fashioned of the pale blues and greys and blacks of glacier ice, he looked every bit the drowned victim of frozen lakes. He had a striking face; he was at that precipice of growth where he would shift from a very pretty boy into a very handsome man, obviously mixed race, thin and angular with strong sharp bones. It was strange and familiar both, the kind of face that made one rethink their perception of beauty. He resembled in his argent hair the ice crusted travelers within a whiteout, starvation in his thin limbs, death in his bloodless complexion, pale as the winter Manëtu from across the water.

Was it the winter or the light creature that had changed him so?

He looked sickly, he looked like death, but what mattered most was the wild magic, and the soul, were in balance. Wolf could lure the boy to the surface easily now, and after that keep him or usher him on, whichever they preferred. 

Satisfied Flint withdrew, letting the thread of blood blur and dissipate in the water as was natural. 

“Nimàt, lean against me.” Moskim was at his side; Wolf sat watching, black yellow eyed shape in the moonlight. He rubbed his bloody palms into his thighs, his hands were cold and numb, except for a sharp pain at the very tips, but, amazingly, he did not feel taxed, not the way he had when he had last given winter over to another. 

“I’m well.” Breathless and cold, but not drained. Twisting a dead human into an icy horror was hardly on par with that of a primordial turtle. “Brace yourself for the sight, the child looks ghastly.” 

“Brother… ”

“No need to thank me, your look of disgust says it all.” Flint snarked as Moskim attempted to help him sit fully in the way one attempted to move a rotting bloated corpse.

“Sorry, Nanabozho has… opinions.”

“Manapush has more than opinions, he has intentions. Perfectly clear, perfectly violent intentions.”

“Yes well, that’s why he’s on a frozen turtle.” 

Flint’s laugh was like grinding rocks. He teetered back, staring at the two bloody handprints on the ice, trembled from the cold, from excitement.“Well?” He asked hoarsely. “What are you waiting for? Raise him.” 

“You are sure you’re well?”

“Kji Niskam! Brother, would you just bring the wretched creature back to life? I have spring spirits to terrorize.”

Wolf and Hare exchanged worried looks, but set to pulling the boy from the lake.

Moskim’s power dipped in so easily is startled him, it wasn’t at all like pushing through ice, the stone and water sang to him, spoke to him as the trees did, billions of drops each their own, a thought, a memory, an experience thousands of years old. The Knowing splintered out in a hundred paths, a glacier dragging itself across the earth, a raindrop sliding down the leaves of an ancient tree, a snowflake spinning dizzily above a lake too wide to fathom. 

Moskim grabbed onto his brothers and focused, let the voices become static, let the thousands of hairs pulled too tightly at his head become threads in the woven mat of life, insignificant, inconsequential. 

Water, water should not have a voice.

What had the wild magic done?

Then he felt the child, restless, conflicted, dreaming the chaotic replay of the dead except there were two sets of memories to draw from. The water voices swarmed around the boy, desperate to sooth the restless mind. Wolf reached out, and carefully pushed the memory dreams away. It was not a permanent banishment, once the soul had been removed from the fused bodies it would regain its true self, for now it would keep the child from undoing the mending Flint had done.

Hare then reached inside, pushing his own energy into stagnant cells, and called the boy from death.

And just as he felt the first heartbeat he was ejected.

Moskim blinked up at the moon, bright and shining and painful, and realized he was on his back. 

The ice was cold, he was only in a breechcloth and leggings beneath his cape, and he was sitting on the ice, but at least his back was warm. Which was actually probably bad, considering Flint was the one holding him up.

Flint should not be warm. Even comparatively.

Nanabozho was probably livid Flint was holding them, and Moskim had to squash that revulsion down before it, combined with the spinning tree line, made him vomit. Except nothing came forward. His brothers were silent.

Moskim rubbed his head. “What happened?”

“What, you don’t immediately know ALL the answers?”

Higher Knowledge was… fuzzy at the moment. His brother-selves were diligent in its suppression, so Moskim could only assume it was still traveling upon the maddening trails of time the water had fed it.

 **“ _You gave the child life._ ”** Wolf said, pressing his muzzle to Moskim’s cheek, washing his face with two quick swipes of his tongue before Moskim could object to the indignity.

“And I’m on the ground because?”

“Because you just shoved Spring magic into a dead winter spirit.” Flint stood and smirked down at him. “You create, so I’ll give you leave on not understanding what it means to change the nature of a thing, but as a trickster one would expect you to grasp patience.”

“The magic rejected me?”

“ _ **Backlash**_.” Wolf nudged his face against Moskim’s chest and helped him to stand, “ _ **perhaps, if you should do this again, be more subtle?**_ ”

“How does one subtly bring the dead back to life?”

“ _ **Slowly, and with great care**_.”

“Heh.” Moskim leaned heavily against Wolf, and watched the ice.

Moments passed in anticipation, but nothing happened. The moon rose higher, though the magic was no longer so painfully oppressive the lake glowed all the brighter and still the child did not surface.

“Could he be blocked by the ice?” Moskim wondered. “Should we break it?”

“No.” Flint stalked the place directly above where the boy was submerged. “The ice would part for him; even without his new magic the lake water has claimed him as itself.”

“I don’t understand.” And that was a terrible thing, not understanding, terrible and new. “We banished the fear, the memories, we gave him immunity to the cold, why doesn’t he rise?”

“ _ **We banished nothing.**_ ” Wolf corrected him. “ _ **We simply made it survivable**_.” He scratched at the ice, ears cocked forward, listening. “ _ **He won’t leave.”**_

“Why?”

“ _ **Because he chooses not to**_.”

“But the lake!” Moskim dragged a hand through his hair, grasping for answers, for his brothers, but they were still drowned out by the static in his head. “If we leave him he will be destroyed!”

“Then we drag him out!” Flint jumped high, the crow cawing, wings flapping madly as it flew from his shoulder. Summoning a spear of stone and ice he slammed it into the lake. The magical hum surged, shrieking, and the moonlit glow brightened. Flint was thrown back by an invisible force into the bedrock cliff.

“Brother!” Moskim rushed to him, reaching for the knowledge that would tell him there were no injuries, and finding nothing but noise. “Are you hurt?”

“Hah.” Flint lay sprawled on the little patch of earth between the granite slabs and the water’s edge and stared up at the stars. “Isn’t that just perfect?” 

Moskim checked through his brother’s thick hair for blood, finding none he sighed, and allowed the aggrieved crow to flap about the idiot’s head in reprimand. “The ice. I can’t believe it attacked you.” He was used to seeing Flint control such things.

 _ **“It appears the lake has a mind of its own.”** _ Wolf said, sitting placidly on the ice.

“What?”

“So many questions when you usually have all the answers.” Flint laughed again, banishing the spear and reaching out for the crow, which bit his fingers irritably, bashing his hand aside with powerful wings. “Ordinarily you would be telling me how you knew it wouldn’t work, or lecturing me on my rashness.”

“It’s not a situation I’m comfortable in, to be sure,” Moskim shot back, “and I’ll settle for scolding you on your violence. ‘Drag him out’? He is a child.”

"One apparently perfectly capable of defending himself.” Crow settled down on Flint’s chest and cawed, smoke pluming from his beak.

“That is beside the point.”

“That is exactly the point.” Flint stood cradling the bird in one arm and gestured to the lake. “Use your brain for once, instead of that power you have. The lake protected him from me, who had already been allowed entry once. How would it react to a serious threat?”

Moskim considered what Flint was saying, and turned to Wolf, who had become quite comfortable on the ice, tongue lolling in amusement. “It’s a lake.” He insisted. “It’s water. Water doesn’t think, doesn’t.. doesn’t protect itself.”

But he remembered the voices, the scattered threads that had forced him to shove the Knowing away to his brother-selves. 

Carefully he reached for it now, and found them winding down, easily suppressed, shut off and silenced. Ioskeha answered him first eager for an update, Gloskap simply offered his patience, while Nanabozho, frustrated and frazzled, squashed the last of the trails. 

The water had acted not like an inanimate thing, nor even like a single spirit, but thousands. It had been too much for him, too many histories, too much knowledge, and he had been forced to cut that part, along with his brother-selves, off to focus.

In his hand TwineTender pulled towards the ice, and Knowing, thank the Creator, told him the spirit was calling out to its master. 

Still the boy remained beneath the ice, and this time when Moskim sought him out the knowledge came. Quiet, dark, scared, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t understand why or where or what. 

“He doesn’t remember. Anything.” His eyes burned but no tears came. “The darkness is all he can see. He is afraid to move, afraid of what calls to him.”

“Well,” Flint deflated, “isn’t that just perfect.”

“You’re repeating yourself dear brother, perhaps you did hit your head.”

“You would know.”

“ _ **Enough, you two.**_ ” Wolf placed himself solidly between them. “ _ **We shall return when the ice has broken and the child can be coaxed to the surface.”**_

Moskim consulted his other selves, and found them in agreement. 

“ _ **Thank you, for your aid.**_ ” Wolf rubbed his head against Flint, who obliged him by running his hands along his muzzle. 

“You’re leaving?”

“ _ **The dead call to me, I don’t have the luxury to focus on one life for long, and this one is no longer under my domain.”**_ Wolf turned to Moskim, “ _ **Until the Thaw**_.” 

“Goodbye, brother.”

Wolf walked into the shadows and vanished.

“Of course it didn’t work.” Flint said softly as he stood, glaring at the ice and clenching his bloody fists.

Moskim felt Gloskap reach out, felt his pain and his pity, and under that his love. “You did exactly as we asked.” He placed his hand on Flint’s shoulder wanting to comfort and soothe, but his brother shrugged him off.

“It wasn’t enough, was it? Give him over to winter? Save him from the cold and dark? **I AM THE COLD AND DARK**. And now I’ve trapped him in it forever.”

“No. No, you made it possible to survive it, it’s our failing that we cannot call him from the depths. In spring we can return.” He grabbed Flint’s arm and made him turn to face him. “You gave us time. Noone can take the power of the lake now, it's tied to him, and protected by the ice.”

“It traps him.” Flint hissed. “In fear and pain, it traps him.”

“Not forever,” Moskim insisted. “Not even for very long.”

Flint’s smile was grim and mocking. “How kind of you, Hare, to say such things. But I know a Liar when I hear him.”

“Gloskap feels love strongest, but we ALL care for you, brother, please don’t mock that.”

“Why not? I am a mockary of everything, why not also love? After all, it isn’t as if I deserve a brother’s affections. Right? Manapush?”

“One day,” Moskim thumped the staff against the ground. “One day I should like us to have a conversation where I am not the intermediary between you and our brothers!”

“And what would you have to say to me that the others wouldn’t, Hare?”

“I may not be as uniquily individual as you,” Moskim grit, “but I am not as one with my brother-selves as Wolf. I can have my own opinions.”

“Oh?” Flint’s smile was wickedly amused. “Like what?”

“Why did you side with the Lenape in the war?” His brother gave Moskim a blank look, thrown off kilter by the sudden subject change. “You are not bound by tribes, but you supported them and continue to aid them over the Haudenosaunee. Why?”

“Rainbow Crow asked me to.” Flint stroked the bird spirit’s feathered side, who leaned down to nuzzle his head into his healing palm. “He requested a winter harsh enough to quell the fighting, but mild enough that his people faced no undo hardships. So that he may warm his tribesmen, strengthen them before the spring.” He smiled again, fondly now. “I thought it would be fun.” He sobered. “You though, you are Lenape, yet you do nothing. Crow came to you first, and you refused him aid.”

Moskim ran his thumb over the knot at the base of the crook. “I am Hare, I was born of the Lenape, but my duty is to all people. I can no more aid my tribe in war than Ioskeha can his. We cannot pit ourselves against eachother, it would be our ruin.”

“That’s why I can’t stand you.” Flint said in a voice dripping with quiet fury. “You’re all such fucking hippocrites.” Then he stormed away.

Moskim watched him go, and felt the other Hares take their leave as well, like peices of him dropping away, until he was alone, and weary. He regarded TwineTender, who rested so forelorn in his hands. It could be a powerful tree spirit, if Moskim planted it in the woods it could become protector, guardian, guide. One day the spirit within could even escape the wood, and wander its forest in physical form.

But the spirit’s mind was set. It would await its master’s return. Moskim lay the staff down on the ice, promising that if the child did not rise in spring he would help it in any he could. Even if it wanted only a new master.

Then he too began walking, because what else was there to do?

When the thaw came, he would return for the child soul, and the power it held. Until then, he pulled his cape around him and headed for home.

*

The wellspring had become a place of mourning, even the wind seemed to sob through the inconsolable trees. 

Light flowed liquid silver over the lake, stronger, brighter than the distant moon reaching its apex. Moonbeams, the glowing globular little messengers of the Man in the Moon, flitted about in their whymsical, disorderly flights. They spiraled about the trees in great strobing numbers, searching out every crevice, chasing the shadows.

Once satisfied the dark places were uninhabited they left, corkscrewing out to the villiges and settlements where children’s fears could be soothed. Save for one, who bobbed about the lake, brushing the surface of the ice in testing strokes, as if for the simple joy of it. 

Then, insubstantial as a ghost, it phased through.

Moments passed in utter silence, the wind eased off, the trees stilled their branches, even the icicles refused to break.

In that absolute quiet the first crack in the ice was a jubilant cry to an answered prayer.

*

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pukòskihële (He Fell Through the Ice)
> 
> Kji Niskam - great spirit
> 
> Nimàt - brother
> 
> Nulelìntàm èli paàn - I’m glad you came (somewhat formal greeting, more formal than hé)
> 
> Hé - hello
> 
> Naka naxansa - dear departed brother, naxansa meaning dear brother and naka meaning deceased. Flint says this with no small amount of cheek.
> 
> Manëtu - a spirit being, any non ghost spirit, also used for gods.
> 
> I do apologize for the long wait. Life has been, honestly, near constant stress. Work, kids, responsibilities. I’m sorry to say recently most of the editing for this was done simply to take my mind off my grief, I wish I could say I finished this for the joy of it. Honestly if the choice is between writing and gardening I’m going to chose gardening these days, I can watch the kids play from the garden, not so much from the computer. 
> 
> If you can, if you haven’t already, please consider donating to my Aunt Brenda’s Gofundme.com/pulsemom she was murdered in the Pulse attack, and her children need all the help we can give. And a preemptive thank you for those who will be paying respects at Monday’s funeral. She was one hell of a woman.


End file.
